#996 - Stephen J. Shaw - Why Population Collapse is Closer Than You Think

30:05Is that Is that a fair way to summarize it? It's a very good way to summarize it. But there's a very cunning element to this, almost a trap. When the average age of motherhood and fatherhood, we have some data, thankfully, for fathers here. We talk too much about women. I do, but it's because we've got so much data on birth records. But this is fathers too. When the average age of motherhood was young, early 20s, the curve had a really high peak because around the same time people were on the same page and you had a lot of evidently in the data pair bonding 95 would be a typical number of people having a child within a few years of that early 20 peak but as the average age of motherhood and fatherhood has extended the curve has flattened and has flattened at a predictable accelerating rate.

31:02So as it shifts right later, it also gets lower and longer? Longer, but at an accelerating rate of collapse. And that's what it is. So what does this mean just for the people that don't work well with graphs, visualizing graphs in their mind? Can you give an example? Yeah. So let me try this one. So back in the day, for many of us, maybe, my parents' generation, younger people's grandparents' generation. There might have been, of course, no internet. There might have been a town dance. There might have been a Saturday night, 8 p.m., everybody in the town got together, all the young people. And from 8 p.m.

31:50to 11 p.m., everybody would be there. And there'd be a bit of gossip at the start. Anybody new, anybody bring their cousin from out of town, any breakups, any new relationships. maybe hoping to get to talk to someone you hadn't talked to or danced with before. As the evening progressed, you might get to this midpoint where you have energy and you get this kind of maximum point where people are dancing and laughing and getting to know one another. And maybe some relationships blossoming from that moment. And then towards the end of the evening, less energy as people start to go home some early and probably not the optimal time to introduce yourself to someone late in the evening.

32:30But imagine in this town, hypothetically, the manager had a great idea. Instead of opening from 8 to 11, I'm going to open 7 p.m. and stay open to 1 a.m. It's not going to be six hours because we're going to get even more energy. But the population of the town is the same. So all you've done now is distribute the same energy over six hours. Some people come early, hoping to meet someone, then get bored and go home. Other people have dinner first and come later. Other people meet someone they think they like and then turn their head at nine o 'clock when someone new comes in that they want to get to know.

33:04And they might get a slap in their face and that's the end of that opportunity. I think what is happening is the exact same loss of energy. I've got a word for it, vitality. I've even got a formula for it. So as this curve is stretched, as we have now, what, 20 years to consider starting a family as a woman? 20 to 40-ish. Right. A man might imagine they have a little bit longer. That energy is sapped out, this lack of vitality. Quite simply, the chance of you meeting someone that you're prepared to make a lifetime commitment to, especially if it involves creating a child together, the chance of you being on the same page with someone you happen to meet randomly goes down rapidly compared to that really compressed early 20s when the likelihood was everyone around was thinking the same thing within a year or two or three.

34:04And that's why I feel the sense of, I don't want to say gloom, but the sense of skill of what we have to do. Because mathematically, based on the evidence of 39 countries and 300 million mothers and a similar number of fathers, um i can't see any way out of this crisis unless the average age of motherhood goes back to a much much younger age and i haven't yet worked out what that is could you not squeeze the age together but have it be higher right so it's an obvious first question yeah well actually it's a good first question i haven't been asked it before to be honest but you're right If you, for example, could keep men and women apart, literally, until they're 27, and then suddenly bring them together, you in theory could have that same peak within a three to four or five year period, and you might have the same high birth rates.

35:08But that's not realistic in any scenario I can see. And that's part of the problem, actually. In every scenario, this curve is still left anchored at around, say, age 18. So you can't shift the curve because people at 18, the race starts at 18. Some people settle down at 18. And some people are thinking, wait a minute, I like that girl at 18. I've lost her. I've lost him. So the process starts. And again, back to this curve, why is it that the number of 18-year-olds who become parents is less than 19-year-olds, 20-year-olds, 21? It just keeps going up and up and up and then down and down and down.

35:48What's the middle of the curve, mostly, for most countries? It's 30. 29.6, 30. South Korea, interestingly, is one of the higher ones, getting close to 32 now. I think that's why their birth rates are so low. Because what you can see in the data for South Korea is a secondary effect, which is almost uniquely a significant increase in one-child families that does not exist. For example, in Japan, about 20 % of families in Japan are having one child only. Around the world, it's typically 15%, 20%. In South Korea, it's 40%. And that's because they're skewed later, which means that you get fertility problems.

36:29Then you get biology becoming a factor at that point. You've said a bunch of times already that a woman turning 30 without a child has a 50 % chance of ever becoming a mother at most. Can you just explain the mechanism that's causing that to happen? Because it requires a little bit of explaining. Yeah. And it's hard to accept because, you know, we want to believe we've got autonomy. We want to believe adamantly that we, within reason, have a good chance of becoming a parent as much in our 30s as in our 20s. Especially given that you've got stats like more women had children over the age of 40 than under the age of 20.

37:15Right. And again, if we get on to the world of media headlines and surveys, that could be a whole other conversation. So there's a lot of misinformation. The reason we're having more births over 40 is not because it's an overall increase. It's that curve has stretched and crept into our 40s, but at the same time brought down birth rates at younger years. But to get to answer your question, I think we overestimate the challenge of, on one level, settling down as we start to form our own lives. At a younger age, we're more flexible. By the time we're in our 30s, we already know pretty much probably where we want to live, what neighborhood of town we want to live in, where we want to go on vacation.

38:04where the kind of friends that we now have, we want our partner to like our friends, we want to like their friends. We want to have the same pastimes and hobbies. So the idea that, oh, I'm just going to randomly meet, now your criteria list is longer and longer. And at the same time, there are fewer and fewer choices. People are becoming, people mostly still do become parents and the potential options to find that perfect partner or even with higher standards right so what do we do well we wait longer and then longer and longer and time fades away but if you look at it from a more mathematical point of view um there's you know and there's a a topic called game theory i don't know if you've come into game theory at all.

38:58It's fascinating. I've taken a class or two in it and I've modeled this exact crisis using game theory. Now in game theory, if anybody wants to watch or has watched Beautiful Mind with Russell Crowe, a wonderful movie in its own right, it covers his discovery of what's called the Nash equilibrium. And a Nash equilibrium is when two people decide that it's in their mutual interest not to change their outcome. And it can be in financial markets, it can be literally gaming, it can be playing card games, it can be, sure, partnering. And I haven't done it justice there. But when you look at pair bonding, to me, evidently, it is a nice equilibrium.

39:52You've got two people who've decided, do you know what? It's in my best interest to stay with this person rather than change to anybody else. And that other person has to think the same thing, especially when it has a cost. And game theory talks about costs. Here, the cost is you're going to have a child together, and that makes it more difficult to have a child with someone else. You're making a long-term commitment. So it's a big decision. Now, what happens when you model birth rate decline using Nash equilibrium, what do you get? A perfect bell curve. You get most people matching somewhere around the middle and you get this fall off at either side.

40:36And what happens when you model this, when you stretch out that curve, when you stretch out those years, well, you find a collapsing curve exactly like we see. Less area under the curve as well as a lower peak. Yes. Right. And I guess you need to add into this the fact that if you start to shift it right, that adds additional complexity on because of the limits of biology. Yeah, which is South Korea's problem right now. It's also our IVF problem right now. IVF is a wonderful thing for some people, the lucky ones. But I can see in the data overall, I mean, this is going to be controversial, but I have to say it.

41:11The more society encourages later in reproductive life technology, the lower the overall chance of a person ever becoming a parent. Because they're not going to find a partner. There's other factors like not finding a partner. People will delay and delay thinking, hey, all this technology now. And it can be other things too. But for me, finding that partner is the biggest one. A quick aside, I've been wearing my Whoop for over five years now, since way before they were a partner on the show. It is the only wearable that I've ever stuck with because it quietly tracks everything that matters, my sleep, workouts, my recovery, my breathing, my heart rate and even my steps.

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42:21That's join.whoop.com slash modern wisdom. Okay, I'm going to try and recap because it is kind of, it is a little complex to even for me, someone that's been swimming in this for a while, wrap my head around. the original vitality curve was a more cohesive tighter sharper peak which is most people in their early 20s went looking for a partner the dance party at which they were trying to couple up was relatively narrow and that meant that if you met somebody it was reliable that their timeline was the same as yours that their goals were the same as yours and that you were both ready and committed to get into a relationship get married start a family do all of those things together.

43:01Now, because, and I'm going to find out why, because why, which we haven't got into, but at least what's happened in terms of the numbers, this curve has flattened. So there are more people choosing to start looking for a partner, coupling, committing, starting a family at differing times, which means that of the overall pool of people, which is actually bigger. So you'd think, well, there's more likelihood of me finding somebody, but there is a greater variance in when people want to. I'm 37, I'm ready. You are 30, you are not. That's an imbalance that typically wouldn't have happened because everybody would have been squeezed together and everybody would have agreed on, culturally agreed on when this is supposed to happen overall.

43:47So as you shift the average age to the right, because people have got things to do with their lives, women are in education, employment, socioeconomic uplift, all the rest of this stuff independence, which we can get into. That's pushed it to the right. That hits a hard biological wall. That brings the height down. You also lose height because it's flatter generally because you have this greater variance, which means that for every one person that you meet, there are only 0.1 people who are at the same stage as you. Also, if you shift it further to the right, you have this Louise Perry calls it the lamp effect, which is if you are moving into an apartment and there's nothing in the apartment, you need to buy a lamp.

44:24It's really easy to find a lamp that fits the apartment. But if you've spent 10 years building the perfect interior design, finding the lamp that fits that very carefully crafted interior design is super tough. This is the same as somebody who's ready to build a life with someone versus somebody who's already built a life and tries to find someone who slots into it. That second version is much more difficult because I'm not compromising on my career so much. I know where I want to live. I've got a preference about, I know what I want for a diet. You have these preferences and they begin to get locked in and ossified as a part of yourself.

44:52Oh, this is a part of me. This is who I am. And it's a big predictor of where I take my self-worth from as opposed to I take my self-worth from my partner and from us being together in this way. We have built a life together as opposed to I have built a life and do you slot into it perfectly? And as you push that later, that preference challenge becomes a higher wall for people to get over, which again makes it less likely. So not only do you need to be at the right stage, the same as me, but I now have an even greater number of criteria that you need to be able to take off in order for this thing to work.

45:24What am I missing? No, that's it. I mean, to be honest, you've done a really succinct job of describing exactly it. I've actually got a name for this overall process. Fatality curve is the curve, but the process I'm calling reproductive synchrony. Okay. Yep. That's a nice term for it. As a man who likes giving unnecessary names to things, it's got my seal of approval. So I think this, and to share more broadly, part of my research right now is extended into other species. This is not human-centric at all. If you look at prairie voles, if you look at wolves, if you look at seahorses, other animals that pair bond, you also have Gaussian curves, these bell curves.

46:05Now, they have not been researched and we can't say they're necessarily the same thing, but it may well be that this is an evolutionary trait. Evolution itself has determined that those species or those cultures or societies that get it right early on are the ones that evolution chooses to... That's interesting. That's interesting. So you need... This suggests reproductive synchronicity. Yes? Yes. Reproductive synchrony. Synchrony, sorry. Reproductive synchrony suggests that cohesion, like uh cultural cohesion is a big part of this so i guess the obvious next question uh assuming that everybody's keeping up i'm holding on for dear life but this is fucking fascinating um what are the driving factors behind the vitality curve moving in terms of height in terms of uh left to right and in terms of distribution yeah so this goes back to uh our conversational last podcast and the first part of my documentary, where we see sudden shifts in this average age of parenthood.

47:14It's very clear in the data. And it, in simple terms, is linked to moments of financial crises. So you can go back to 1973, 74 in much of Europe and Japan, 71 in the US, mid-90s in Korea, and more recently after the mortgage crisis shock in the US and many other countries 07, 08. And what do you see? Well, mothers, parents who already have one child, really no change at all in their progression to have two, three, four or more children as before. You would barely notice that there's been a crisis. But you see that those who have not had a child suddenly delaying parenthood because there's a sudden drop in first-time births.

48:01How sudden do I mean? Well, the paper just published has a section describing Japan in 1974, the last quarter of 1974, every single prefecture in Japan, 47, I believe, they all, whether they were metropolitan, whether they were rural or the tropical beaches of Okinawa, every single one of those saw an identical trend, a drop in first-time births in that quarter. Well, that's kind of confusing because there's no financial shock in 1974. until you realized what happened nine months earlier. Well, actually 12 months earlier, which is interesting, you had the oil shock. Japan, the biggest oil importer in the world.

48:46I showed in the documentary the reels of the shelves. It was like COVID, you know, times 10. It was just everything sold out in those days, mass panic buying, and a nation that had gone through this period post-war of rapid growth suddenly realizing without oil, they have a problem. What happened naturally, parents across all of Japan, every prefecture decided, sorry, non-parents, wait a minute, not this year, maybe next, maybe next. Same after the Lehman Mortgage Crisis. We say it in 2009. Yep. So after the financial crises in the US, we can see in the data this measure that demographers unfortunately still use.

49:30I feel sorry for so many demographers, is the total fertility rate, which measures this thing called the average woman that doesn't exist. But still, it's a measure that we tend to use mostly. The average woman started having fewer children. And that decline is known to be mapped back to that period of time. But the measures I introduced in my recent paper show that the average mother, the TMR, the total maternal rate, didn't change at all. James, explain the difference between TFR and TMR. So this has just come out in my recent paper, and it separates the average woman into two women, which is a step forwards, mothers and non-mothers.

50:17So the average mother, the total fertility rate, really, to me, has been the reason demography has missed many of these trends in recent decades. There is no average mother. simply because you can't be a mother and a non-mother at the same time. If you look at the TMR, the proportion of women who are becoming mothers, that number descended sharply after 08, 09. It was around 0.8, 0.85 even women in the US were becoming mothers prior to that. Now it's heading down close to 0.6. So it's gone from most to nearly half. Yes. And it's left the U.S. today. So we know from CDC, National Family Growth Surveys, which are the most reliable thing we have for the U.S., we know that 90 % or more of women either have or want children during their fertile years.

51:166 ,000 interviews used to be all in-home interviews, which are highly accurate. Now it's a hybrid, which has made it a little bit more blurry, but it's given us a very good sense. 90 % have or want children around age 30. And when you compare that to the TMR, which the US is now heading towards 60%, it means that for every 10 women in America today, if fertility patterns stay the same as they are now, one out of 10 would choose not to have children, but only six will have children. Another three will be women who are, I use the term unplanned childlessness. Involuntary childlessness. Well, this is another term.

52:03I appreciate the chance to just clarify. Voluntary childlessness is easy, choosing not to have children. Involuntary is well-defined as people who have medical issues. So either... Oh. Now that can be you had a disease, there's something just not medically the way it should be, or it can be you've tried IVF and it's failed. The other side, the bigger side, is this circumstantial childlessness. I call it unplanned childlessness, which is like, so let's link all this together. Japan going back, all these waves of delaying parenthood. People, they weren't saying, I don't want kids now because of the shock.

52:46I've changed my mind. They were saying, not yet, not yet. And that's what's happened. And we've slid into this world of delayed parenthood through people saying not yet. And of course, when people were saying not yet, they were doing something else. They were pursuing their careers or education. Sure, good thing. But there's a consequence to that. If people are pursuing their careers longer, it becomes a societal norm to pursue your careers longer. In fact, it becomes a risk of vulnerability, particularly to women, to have children younger. So suddenly you've pulled the needle later and later and later.

53:23And the fear of fears I have in this,

53:30time moves forward. It's easy to stretch the age of parenthood as a society. It's easy to say, well, not this year, not 25, 27, 29, next year, next year. How as a society, even if people want to, And I think a lot do. As a society, how do we kind of go back in time? Because we have to go through a turbulent period where people, let's say, over 27 are still having the kids they want to have. But we have a new bubble of younger people at the same time coexisting. We need a new. And that's where, to me, the only hope lies. That we do have a group of younger people saying, wait a minute, I don't like what I'm hearing.

54:13That doesn't work unless you can do it in a coordinated manner, because you can't be one person at 22, the equivalent of a population bubble of a small number of people at 22. You need a large social movement overall. Okay, so one thing that's been in my head as we've been talking, like the obvious question, and this is what happens when I speak to anybody about this stuff, whether it's Lyman Stone or Brad Wilcox or the Louise Perry, no matter who it is I speak to about this, Simone and Malcolm Collins. One of the coolest questions that people love to ask is why are birth rates declining? And what you're suggesting here is that there's actually sort of two buckets of answers.

54:56One is social, cultural, expectational, psychological, financial, education, you know, all of these things that are occurring to people that make them feel like something's going on. But that is feeding into this dynamic. And the dynamic is reproductive synchrony or vitality curve stuff. Is that a way to look at it? Because it seems like the vitality curve is shifted. And when people say why, what you could give an answer, justifiable answer based on today, is what the vitality curve has moved and flattened. That is why, but it's also not why. Does that make sense? Yeah, but it changes the question.

55:39The question then becomes why is the vitality curve shifted? Yes. Which is the right question to ask rather than why are birth rates falling? So suddenly we can start to ask the right question. And I think that moves us forward a lot. Because it's a much more direct intervention to say what we need to do is shift this curve back. It's a more accurate question, more precise question. Okay, so I guess...

56:02Could I just add in, I mean, with greatest respect to everyone else researching in this field, there are multiple interesting factors. I mean, for example, falling sperm counts keeps coming up. Just to explain, if there were falling sperm counts, we would not get a vitality curve of this shape. We just wouldn't. Because it would be... It would be skewed in some way. Slanted, yeah. And you would see over time that this impact it would have. This curve exists and it's shifted rightwards, but at different times in different countries. So you'd be saying kind of, well, yeah, the sperm can't suddenly affect the people of all age in Japan 20 years before the US.

56:46It just doesn't make sense. Now, those issues like that may still be a major problem to increasing the fatality curve. But they're operating at a level that's not as powerful as the curve itself, which is effectively defining, governing the number of people who become parents. And to put it in some context, heuristically, 90 % of birth rate decline is related to the average age and vitality. 10 % is everything else. How do you know that? Because there's a formula. If we go back to what I said earlier, you've got the average age of parenthood, you've got the stretch. Those are important factors, but you also got some little ripples.

57:26They do exist, some imperfections. and you can clearly see that, okay, those imperfections are kind of defy this kind of law-like, law of nature. And you realize, oh, actually, we can do something through policies and incentives. You look at Hungary and there was a bubble of people. Or else there wouldn't be ripples. There wouldn't be ripples. So we can do something. There are interventions that are available. But they're so minor compared to the overall power of the curve itself. Understood, right, okay. Yeah, that makes sense. I asked the question, what causes the vitality curve to shift? The first thing that you said was financial crises.

58:05A lot of the time when you ask people, what's your desire for children? Do you want to have children? Why have you not yet have children? Why do you not plan yet to have children, etc? At least if you look at social media, one of the first places people will go to is just don't have the money, cost of living, crisis, etc. This to me, you saying financial crisis would just play straight into that. It's like, okay, it is how much money people feel like they have and that they need to have kids. And if they have this threat, this looming specter of economic uncertainty or a real felt sense of economic scarcity in their own lives and lives the people around them don't want to have kids.

58:47Is that true? Why did you go first to financial out there? Why is that the predictive driver? Yeah. So one really noticeable fact here is that after these crises, the average age of parenthood doesn't go back. The curve doesn't go up. It becomes locked in even when times become more prosperous. So if it were simply correlated to finance alone, you would see a curve shifting later and then shifting back or shifting up again in some context. It simply doesn't. It would be related to environmental security in that way. Yeah. Well, you find that vulnerability rationally causes people to delay. But you equally find that because it's a societal synchrony, getting everybody to synchronize suddenly to take the risk, particularly for women, to have a child earlier.

59:43Why does it ratchet only later, not earlier? I don't know how, so I like to use Japanese terminology for it's very clear. In Japan, Japan's employment system is very hierarchical based on the year you started working for a company. In fact, right the way through, rather than by performance. So you have Senpai is your boss, Kohai is your junior. And particularly if you're a woman, if you have a child before your boss, before Senpai, Kohai will probably get your job. If you wait till Senpai has her child, you will probably get her job. so there is this kind of everyone's frozen in the headlights thinking well when is the right time to take the step out of the career ladder when i get to that certain point and you're looking at those people who entered employment a little bit before you mostly and looking at the societal norm now how do you go back how do you then say okay kohai you can go first now you know we're going to go back to your age it feels much more risky um yeah that's that's fascinating that's and that would explain the ratchet thing.

1:00:56You don't have a God's eye coordination issue to be able to drag people back because the tendency of I'll just wait. And it is, you know, it fundamentally is from a financial perspective, safer to wait. Financially, it is safer to wait, right? The single biggest predictor of wealth is age. You get more wealthy as you get older. If the thing that you are optimizing for is wealth, which is security, right? This will, it's a prophylactic against the financial crisis that just happened. Oh, fucking hell. Like, I'm going to stick about. What if things don't go well again in the future? I'll be all right.

1:01:30I'll keep pushing forward. It doesn't surprise me that then shifting that back is something that wouldn't happen. Yeah, and this may be the great gotcha that nature has planted for us, that there's no going back. It only pushes us later and later. Yes. What, um, I just want to sink into sort of what's happening with, uh, women's culture, uh, that interpretation of having children. This is something that we talked about a lot on the last episode. People got really pissed. Let's do it again. Um, what is happening with women's desire for children, the culture around, um, becoming mothers, child rearing.

1:02:11Uh, there was a number last time that we spoke about, which was 80 % of women who reach menopause without children didn't intend to not have children. Does that still hold up? Yeah. There is a caveat. It's only a temporary one, so it does hold up. When you look at nations that have gone through this transition to low birth rates, high childlessness, it holds up. So if you go back 30, 40 years, and you're looking at the 1960s when childlessness in the US, many countries might have been 5%. It was much lower, which suggests that the people who did it were doing it through volition. Exactly. We're talking about the modern world.

1:02:53Fuck that. Fuck the 60s. Well, you say that, but you know, the number of researchers, my gosh. Oh, well, if we go back to the 60s, you'll actually find that... Chris, cohort studies. It's just a fucking selection effect. Are these people actually stupid? It's the same as saying, well, look, the divorce rate's going down. It's like, yeah, because the marriage rate's going down, because the only people getting married are the ones who are really certain that they want to get married. Well, this is just a kind of plea to the world of demography and researchers for a second. Stop being so retarded.

1:03:25Stop using cohort for your predictions of the future compared to period-based risks of what's happening right now. And we see it all over the place. And I get accused even recently by senior professors saying, no, we saw some data for a cohort study. Yeah, it was women born in the 1960s compared to the 1940s. Of course, family size went down back that far ago because cohort studies take decades to get pregnant. All right. Bring us into the 21st century. What do women think about having kids? I see no evidence of change. The CDC numbers have fallen a little bit. It used to be 95 % of women have or want children around that age of 30.

1:04:09Now it's closer to 90%. So there is a shift downwards. But there's also been other shifts that have gone on at the same time of delayed parenting. And, you know, all washed out. You know, I have talked to, I mean, the documentary, 24 countries, 230 people interviewed. mostly women often you know sitting in their homes talking about their dreams and aspirations and since then hundreds if not thousands of personal conversations and clearly not everyone wants children and we have to respect and I want to say this because otherwise there'll be comments against me and certainly you get grouped in with it too I'm sure I don't believe we should be coercive at all we should be entirely respectful that some people genuinely do not want children.

1:05:02And that's fine because those people have other things that they can do to support society. I don't think it benefits anyone by trying to guilt them in any way. I wouldn't want to live in a society where we were trying to guilt people into having children. They're also not going to make particularly good mothers if you force somebody who doesn't want to be a mother into being a mother. Right. Yeah. I mean, look, I can see exactly why you're going with this. At no point in any of the conversations that me and you have had have we said, we should be forcing women who don't want to be mothers into being mothers.

1:05:31That's not where you improve birth rates from. We're talking about the huge, overwhelming percentage that 80 % of women who pass reproductive window and do not have kids didn't intend to not have kids, right? This unplanned childlessness. And these women have support groups to grieve over families that they had. Like of the two groups of people, the one who's on the outside saying, look at these two white men getting women out of the boardroom and back into the kitchen, making them domestic prostitutes, conned by the patriarchy into just churning out women. This is just the handmaid's tale all over again.

1:06:11Where's your compassion for the 80 % of women, the overwhelming majority? And the 20%, me and you were saying, awesome. Like you made your life choice. That's totally great congratulations enjoy your future in however you want to do that like how is this not the compassionate perspective when you've got women who literally have fucking support group who is that lady that's got the early day judy day fucking fantastic yeah and and and they have support groups to grieve to that sentence grieve over the family that they never had yes like i mean it's it's if you've ever been around a woman who is getting toward an because i'm 37 some of my friends and friends' friends are doing this.

1:06:53These women who are feeling the ticking clock of biology, uh, like not just conceptually, they're coming into contact with it in reality. And it is a type of like terror. It's like a fear. It's like rabbit beyond rabbit in headlights. You know, I, you know, I just give an example of a woman I had lunch with because she wanted to talked to me, knowing I'd made the documentary in Japan, 35 years old, just gone through another breakup and distraught. She said, I don't want flowers. I don't want vacations. I don't even want romance. I just want family. And you realize that this is a woman getting that point of realization that the likelihood she will become a mother is becoming more fleeting and fleeting This episode is brought to you by Gymshark.

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1:08:23So you can buy it and try it for 29 days. And if you don't like it, you can just send it back. Plus, they ship internationally. Right now, you can get 10 % off everything from Gymshark site-wide by going to the link in the description below or heading to gym.sh slash modernwisdom and using the code modernwisdom10 at checkout. That's gym.sh slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom10 at checkout. Have you got the number? So you said a woman reaching 30 without kids has a 50 % chance of ever becoming a mother? At most. At most. What about 35? Oh, I mean, it's, it's, it does vary by country. I'm not going to cite it here, but I guess I'm going to say it's 15%.

1:09:00I'll be pretty sure that woman without children at 35 has a 15 % chance of ever becoming a mother. Okay. I'm just going to, because we haven't fully delved into this and I do think it's an important, um, qualifier to explain what this means. a lot of women that are listening and guys that are listening would be like, 50 %? Like I could have sex with a woman who's 31 today once over and over. It's easily get pregnant. That's not what we mean. It's not that there is a 50 % chance of you getting pregnant. What we mean is of all of the women who as yet haven't had children by age 30, this includes single women.

1:09:36This includes women who are coupled, but not married. This includes married women that haven't yet tried. but a big cohort of that is people who are as yet not in the situation that is ready for them to be able to start a family and that bundles all of this in if you reach that age the likelihood is that you probably haven't been trying because most people who try to get pregnant do get pregnant who want to it is a how do you come to describe how do you come to explain it in this sort of way that i'm doing it here well the number of people i've met who were in a stable relationship at some point in their 20s maybe into their 30s thinking this is it you know everything's good now and then suddenly go through a breakup and very often for the woman the breakup comes from the man and within a year he's got a child with a 25 year old who's traded down and now you've got a 33 year old woman who has to find someone else and has to start trying to think of having a child maybe age 35 or 38 if they don't meet the same person again so it's it all and this comes back to the vitality curve it's finding that match and committing quickly committing quickly yeah because if you wait this is the thing dude so many people that i i've talked about this a lot uh since we had our first conversation and a lot of the time I bring up a theory from evolutionary psychology that is maybe more a notion than a theory, but at least it's postulated to be true.

1:11:06If two people that are in a committed relationship, pair bonded together, are together for a good chunk of time, we're talking, you know, three to seven years, something like that, and no children have come along. Sometimes they break up. And you would think, well, I've broken up because we just fall out of love. We don't have the same sort of spark anymore, the energy, the chemistry, we argue all the time. Yeah, what would be the adaptive reason for that the adaptive reason would be ancestrally there was no reliable birth control which meant that and and who was in a relationship and not having sex and unbelievably small like you know the the asexuals of the uh past era there probably weren't many and it certainly wasn't a meme that stuck about to survive um most people ancestrally that were together and pair bonded had sex most people that had sex got pregnant because they couldn't do contraception.

1:11:54That means that most couples who were together for a long time and didn't have kids, it was due to a fertility issue. Now, I don't know if it's me. I don't know if it's you. What I do know is if we break up, there is a 50 % chance or something like that, 50 % chance that the next partner that I get with is going to be able to have kids with me in case it's a you problem. And if it's a me problem, I'm just going to keep cycling through that until that goes. Now, this is just this underlying dynamic that sounds like a restrictive, horrible judgment on people that choose to not have kids immediately when they're in a committed relationship.

1:12:28It's like, what do you mean? I got with it when I was 25 or 29 or 30 or 31 or whatever. Like, we're going to start when we're ready to start. And we love each other. We love each other just as much as we ever did. You're like, yeah, I get that. But I do think that you should treat whatever we want to call this like infertility paradox with caution i think that it's a dynamic that comes in and just causes people the way that she used to sip her tea that i thought was so cute now fucking drives me up the wall like these little things creep in and how much of that is due to this dynamic how much of that is due to this ancient programming of there's something wrong here we've been together a long time no kids have arrived something's wrong with one of us i think that we should move on.

1:13:09There's an effect, and this is also a theory, but I think it plays into this, what I term little sister syndrome. So if you back a few decades when most people were marrying and settling down early twenties and starting a family, for the man, there weren't that many younger sisters in the dating market yet. You were probably going to marry someone closer to your age, 18 plus. But as the dating window, that fatality curve has shifted more and more left, of course, I don't necessarily literally mean the sister of the one you're with right now, but that generation is suddenly interesting to you. There's a distraction there.

1:13:50There's more options, which itself may induce part of the delay. Oh, right. Okay. So the reason that guys, women that are saying, you know, I'm ready to commit, I'm ready to start a family. And he just keeps putting it next year. We'll go next year. We'll go next year. Well, if he knows subliminally or consciously that he's 35 dating 32, but he's seen quite a lot of 27 and 25 and they look pretty fucking fertile and hot to trot. You're like, maybe I'll just hold off just a little bit. And then the trade out happens. So this, this is really interesting because it, because women are the ones mostly not just that men's fertility drops with age as well.

1:14:32That's why I froze my sperm this year. Um, because women are more, uh, restricted, uh, in terms of their ability to, to reproduce, uh, they have a much harder and faster line men who do this uh like holding pattern dynamic thing where guy of 30 gets into relationship with girl of 27 they stay together for five years then he trades down for a younger woman that still allows younger woman to have a child with older man but that kicks older partner potentially out the top of the mating pool and means that it's unfortunately, desirability for women is at least slightly correlated with age. And that means that the dating market is going to be tougher for her to step into.

1:15:28And that means that the likelihood of them now falling off the end of this reproductive window is greater. Yeah, but there's another impact to this as well. Brilliant. Which is that that one woman who now is reaching the end of her likely fertility window, for every woman there's also a man who is also, in effect, also checking out. Men can have children with more than one woman, which is a slight blur of this, but that's not that many overall. So again, it comes back. So if you look at the vitality curve for men and women, men have the same shape curve, but not quite as high a peak and more stretched.

1:16:07but you can see that these curves are linked together. So whatever is happening to women ultimately is happening to men too. But can I just come back to this waiting game that's going on in people's 20s? So if you take a 20-year-old today, let's say a 20-year-old man for a second, and maybe he's got his first girlfriend or thinking about it, he's probably not thinking she's the girl I'm going to have kids with because that's 10 years later or maybe more where does that come from where does that's 10 years later because the vitality curve looking at the average age of parenthood in a society the societal norm or people this cohesiveness around the central age on average there are exceptions but it's all in this curve mostly young men are not thinking she's the one for life.

1:17:05She's the one to have kids with. And she's also not thinking the same thing. So then you get to a point of, I imagine, and this might be more your expertise than mine, that men in early 20s are thinking, well, what's the point of dating at all? Really, why make any commitment of any kind? In fact, what's the point of even being in the dating game at all compared to becoming, in Japan, at Otaku, someone stays at home and plays gaming machines. And you have neats here, you have so many other social things these days, you know, infidels, themselves, all of these things. I believe those are downstream of the fertility crisis of delayed parenthood, because nature didn't design it for people to sit idly in their 20s.

1:17:54I mean, we can't assume that shifting this period of having family 10 years out would be without some social impact. Yeah, I think it's an interesting one, at least where that comes into land. For me, the tall girl problem, as I've come to call it, raising socioeconomic standards that women have got and hypergamy, those two together means that there's an ever-increasing cohort of high-performing women competing for every decreasing cohort of ultra-high-performing men above and across from them. The research doesn't seem to be great at kind of reducing hypergamy down. Hey, women, if you're outperforming men socioeconomically, maybe you should be looking to date a little bit lower.

1:18:37It's even difficult to try and separate out education from employment that a woman with a degree or a master's dating a blue collar worker who earns more than her, but is less educated. There's some complications in that too. So men can't even compensate for undereducation with overemployment in that regard. So the whole, it doesn't matter dude go and get your apprenticeship you can earn more money as a co or whatever sometimes that doesn't work because people tend to mate within their education band yeah like um that to me at least seems to be one of the big drivers of this imbalance in early age it's one of the reasons that you're getting older guys dating younger women because by that you're able to compensate so much more socio-economically that it does um flip that imbalance but given that people date assortatively within their education band and two women for every one man are completing a US college degree.

1:19:32Like that, that's just raw data again on this, that isn't great for mating when it comes to sort of the relational aspect of this. The thing, just to kind of round out the women point that we came into earlier on, I saw a really interesting reaction to Taylor Swift getting engaged. Taylor Swift got engaged to Travis Kelsey. She has been, I think for a lot of women, a kind of permanent breakup artist for a very long time, you know, sort of over a decade now. She's been singing about the machinations and challenges of a woman going through the world of makeup and breakup and heartbreak. And I saw a bunch of different threads and forums talking about how it's such a shame that Taylor had got engaged because she was going to be such a wonderful role model for child-free women.

1:20:23Now, that makes sense if she wanted to be child-free, and she still may. Her and Travis may decide to not have kids. Something tells me that that's not going to be what happens. First off, I think that there is going to be a bump in your vitality curve if Taylor Swift gets pregnant. Just because of that mimetic, like you see mothers around you, that means that you get more mothers thing. Like, I just think that's going to be, you know, I'm sure that some group of women lost weight when Adele lost weight. And Lizzo, right? You know, like people that are in the public eye that do a thing, you end up doing that thing too.

1:20:58But the other side of this is, I think a lot of the conversation, the question I have is, why is the conversation that is so pro or so anti-natalist specifically for women that you don't need to have kids you're being forced into a family if it's the case that four out of five women that fall off their reproductive window and didn't intend to not have kids how can it be the case that the talking point online encouraging women to not have kids why is that not being pushed back against four in five women that are childless didn't intend to be. Yeah. So I've come to see a huge divide, a lack of empathy, understanding between those people who want kids and those people who simply don't to a point I think often they can't understand each other.

1:22:01If you don't want kids, it's hard to understand why anybody would want to get up three times during the night for the first three years of your kid's life and have to transport them to every afterschool activity for a couple of decades. And on the other side, if you do have that strong desire to children, it's really quite hard, I think, to understand completely why someone just doesn't have that desire. So I think part of this is fueled by this lack of empathy and understanding, but it goes deeper than that. I mean, anti-natalism is alive and well, and, you know, it's one of those things hiding in plain sight, but it certainly touches me, you know, when I get heckled by a professor in Japan, as I was recently, you know, a British professor of strategic thinking, I believe it was, came into a class of Japanese young students while I was talking about the subject and started hurling questions at me without letting me respond or being canceled at Cambridge University because that happened, I think, just after a podcast.

1:23:14It was too controversial a topic. Well, where is that coming from? Why is it that people want to make it their business to tell other people not to have children? And I believe it has come from sources, sources that had good funding back in the 60s and 70s. The person you referred to earlier who was telling people that they should be locked up if they have more than two children in America, that was Paul Ehrlich, who wrote the book Population Bomb. and clips of him saying that are in the documentary. But the funding for that came from some very substantive foundations. And those organizations are still there.

1:23:57I show in the documentary the latest part, how in the U.S., Paul Ehrlich's non-profit organization is still alive and well. What's it called? Population Connection, based on D.C. And they boast that they teach, provide materials to 3 million high school children per year based on... What's the justification? Why do they want fewer people to exist? Well, I think they're locked in time. You know, talking to them, they are affable people. They will, you know, tell you how wonderful kind of it can be to a child, but then tell you 20 reasons why you might not want to. And then they have a very, I would say, clever tactic of pointing to stats of people in Africa and showing pictures of here's an Afghan man marrying his 10-year-old bride and then suddenly telling you, you can do what you want.

1:24:50So there's this undertone. Now, they are part of a group, and I'm happy to state it because the CEO told me that they do not inform people about birth rate decline. I would say to anybody listening to this who themselves or knows a volunteer working for organizations like that,

1:25:14stop because you are telling half truths to young people find an organization that's telling the full truth about exactly what's happening and particularly when it comes to sex education we're very good at telling young people how to avoid pregnancy and that's a good thing what we're not good at all is telling people there's a fertility window and by the way you've a lot to cram into your 20s and by the way here's the real data on the likelihood of becoming a parent at age 30 or 35 15 at 35 is fucking insane that's so wild that's optimistic um what do you make of people who celebrate women having fewer children

1:25:58i don't understand it i mean i really it evil evil if people don't want children they shouldn't have them if people are having fewer children because they themselves have decided to have well fewer than what fewer there is an organization in the uk who come out with this mantra people should have fewer children than they want

1:26:27so i asked the question online well what happens if you only want one child if you have fewer children than they want and they repeat how people should have fewer children than they want well whatever the math is let's say you wanted four children okay you know i'm indoctrinated now from this message as a teenager i'll have three i'm hearing it again so i'll have two you know you can see the direction i mean this i mean nihilism is out there and it's real some people do state i think after the documentary came out there was one nihilist channel on youtube who reviewed my documentary and they sat through and watched it all together.

1:27:06And it was just interesting seeing these people who genuinely believe that humanity should become extinct. That's a very different perspective, right? Yeah. So I had a conversation with Alex O 'Connor recently and he explained, there's a bunch of different brands of antinatalism. There are some that are so extreme, very few. There's some that are so extreme that once you're alive, you should kill yourself. Like that's a very particular, I guess that's like anti-humanism in some sort of a way. That's a real, so if you're that anti-natalist, if you were super, super anti-natalist, you'd be like, well, even though I'm alive, I should no longer be alive because you are impacting the planet by that.

1:27:42So, you know, you can put your money where your mouth is if you don't want that many people on the planet. No. And then you sort of move forward to people like David Benatar, if you're familiar with him, it'd be fascinating for you to look at. So his philosophical position is basically that suffering is more painful than pleasure is enjoyable. And most of human life is some suffering which outweighs the pleasure. And he's got some other sort of squirrely ideas. And he's a philosopher, like an anti-lateless philosopher. A little tough to wrap your head around at times. So again, like impact is going to be at least moderated.

1:28:19But then there's places like stophavingkids.org who hold rallies here in Austin, Texas. Yeah, I think when you ask the question like, what are the impacts of people not having kids or people having fewer children? There's two buckets as far as I can see. One is the personal. What does this do for men and women who reach a later age and don't have a family, who reach the end of their life and haven't gone through the process of having a family. Like, that's one. And then the other is the macro. It's like, what does this do to the human race? What does this do to economics, politics, culture, so on and so forth?

1:28:59Is that how you come to think about the impacts? Yes. Yes, I think it's a very good way. And often we only think about the macro. You know, and I think those people who are, you know, I guess protesting about other people having children, I think they have been fed information that these macro problems are so vast that they obscure any sense that there is a micro problem in personal people's lives. People don't yet understand the level of desire there is to have children. Especially given that the people who are child-free by choice are very vehement about it, and they knew. So I think you have the, it's such a, there is an asymmetry in the sexiness of the argument, right?

1:29:45But even, Chris, I have to say, I hate that term. Child free by choice? Child free. The idea you put the word, we don't say pet free. I don't have a dog. I'm not pet free. That's just not the term we would even think of using. If I don't go on vacation this year, I'm not vacation free because you have the hassle of booking the flights and you're packing whatever else. The term free was attached to the word child by ideologists. certain waves of feminism going back many decades. It's a burden and you have relinquished yourself from it. Right. And the reason I don't like it, oh, there's many reasons I don't like it, to be honest with you.

1:30:23The term free we use for disease-free, debt-free, stress-free, universal negatives. We don't put free after something that actually most of us want. But it goes further than that. There are people who do not have children by choice, childless by choice, I call them, who also don't like that term. Two of them are school teachers I know who've said to me, I would never use that term. It's a horrible term. I could never tell my class that I'm child free. So I don't know. I think it's another example how this ideological antinatalism and whatever flavor has been allowed to seep into the psyche. Yeah.

1:31:06Like I said, I think that there's a real, it's a little bit of a messy argument to try and get across. and it's not the sort of thing that you can say instantly because you've got the macro and the personal occurring separately. So someone will say, well, you should stop having kids because of the environment, right? There's too many people on the planet or because of carbon emissions or something like that. And one of the costs of that, let's say that that is true. I actually don't think it is. I think it's like 0.04 % over the next 200 years if population stays the same versus decreases. um let's say that you do say that and you're like okay well what are the what are the costs to that person individually like well relationally they're uh the 80 of women don't have kids didn't want to have kids grieving families they never had etc but then you can go the other way too and you can say uh the girl with a list on tiktok did you ever see that girl who wrote 350 reasons about you know everything from can't go to brunch with the girls to can't wear cute heels to literally a parasite growing inside of you.

1:32:09It's like every bad thing. And then it was, you know, eight pages of reasons not to, and then half a sheet of A4 of why you should. And that's somebody who is talking about the personal, but not thinking about the macro. That's not thinking about the impact economically, politically, so on and so forth. And other impact that people often don't think about is, I mean, we're talking, I remember we had this in the last podcast, this analogy of like, People imagine you can glide down to some better optimal population number. There's too many people here today. How many? Oh, maybe 1 billion. We're just going to glide down.

1:32:45It doesn't work that way. It's a collapsing spiral of ever-decreasing births. So births half over a certain period of time, depending on the birth rate. South Korea, it's every 18 years. In the UK right now, it's 55 years. In the US, it's probably similar. So we're talking halving of births in decades. I'm 37, so potentially in my lifetime, I'm going to see 150 million people in the US. Births. Yes, births. So, yeah, there'll be a ton of older people. Yes, yes. But if you look at the birth numbers, they will be, you know, instead of 4 million right now, on current patterns, it's going to be closer to 2 million in the US.

1:33:26But it doesn't stop there. That's the point. Then it halves again and again and again. So even if you're one of the people who think, no, I still am happy for us to not glide, but this kind of roller coaster downward, that's a good thing. I think you should really be thinking about, okay, maybe... Just how vertical is this line? Yes, and how would we stop it if we wanted to? Because we're in this kind of, it's not a glider, we're spiraling down. The engines are off. The engines are off, and there's no pilot, and there's no manual as to how to how this river. Can you give me a overview of what the macro impacts of declining population size over the next couple of centuries is going to be?

1:34:04Over the next few decades? Well, I can because, you know, eight years now in Japan, you know, I'm living it. And if you're in the center of Tokyo, mostly you won't see it. You'll probably notice relatively few children around. But you go into the suburbs of Tokyo, never mind going into the rural decaying towns. let's just take a suburb of Tokyo that going back to the 70s was burgeoning apartments were built there luxury apartments for 10 ,000 people now those apartments are still fully occupied 98 % occupied they show this in the documentary but now it's old people many of whom are old women living alone no children around the playgrounds are kind of grassed over you know long grass and the most moving moment in making my entire documentary and there were many was going there to film and being told by some locals that the week before a 90 year old woman had jumped off the roof because she was lonely and then going to talk to a pharmacy and the local grocer to be told, oh yeah, this happens every week.

1:35:27So you realize that the impact is not the total number of people. The impact to me is the loneliness and I think the mental disorders that come through that loneliness for people who don't have family. And even those who do have family where we lose as a community, where in shrinking worlds, if children move away, and most they will, they want to find somewhere more vibrant where we're going to have these decaying worlds. Now, I've worked on projects in Japan

1:36:04and talked to mayors, municipalities, and the heartbreak in their faces, the gloom, because they know that their future. I came up with a term actually this morning. I just wrote an article for The Spectator and I came up with the term futurehood.

1:36:32I think, you know, I've been spending a little bit of time in Hanoi, Vietnam, and I really enjoy just spending a little bit of time in a vibrant nation with energy and youth. It was crazy the first time I was there and it was like, no, this has got something Japan is missing, Europe is missing, and it's that youth energy. People in Vietnam don't worry about their future. They know they have a future. They can see it around them through the construction, through the building work. You go to Japan, and that futurehood, that sense there is a future, which I think underlines nationhood, is gone. And these mayors and these municipalities are making tough decisions as to what services do I cut next?

1:37:11How am I going to keep that bus service to that town? 5 ,000 schools have closed in Japan in the last 15 years, an average two per day. You take a school away, communities disappear. So looking at total headcount is another distraction. I think that has been, you know, everything's stacked against us actually because it's too easy to, you know, play with numbers if you're an antinatalist, just focusing on, oh, look at the total headcount of the planet or look at the total headcount of the US, we'll be fine, without realizing as you peel away the layers, the economic infrastructure is one of decay.

1:37:48And then behind all of that, what I worry about, have you seen the movie or read the book, Children of Men? Yep. So when we're making the documentary, one of the film crew kept telling me, wow, you should watch Children of Men. And the title didn't really stand out to me as something like Why of Men. Because what I was talking about to the crew was, oh, it's going to become this really gloomy world, a world without children. That's not a positive thing when you literally see your world in decay. And there seems to be no way out of it in Children of the Man. It just shows that, I think, perfectly.

1:38:25Different storyline, perhaps, but not that far off. So I worry about despondency. And I think it comes back. So why am I even sitting here? Why am I not kind of closing up research, saying we're done and that's it? Well, there is hope, and that hope lies with the youth. It lies in new bubbles of people in their 20s saying, do you know what? I'm just going to re-sequence life. I'm going to figure out a way to do this, to have family at the same time. And the power that younger people are going to have, given they're a shrinking number in many nations, I think will mean employers will have to follow them and say, do you know what?

1:39:04I will give you that sabbatical to have children. And the real I think game changer in all of this comes back to education. I would love to take a year of high school and a year out of college. I think people should be in the workforce by 21. And let's have people start their lives and get established at a younger age. Well, less education, that's not a good thing. No, no, I mean, switch the education model to lifelong learning. I go back to college. I still do. I haven't for a couple of years, but I just love going back. I used to come to the US summer schools for three or four years, studying psychology and game theory and all sorts of other things that were of interest.

1:39:49I think switching our education pathways and why would universities, colleges, education boards want to do this? Well, the reality is that universities around the world are faced with an ever-shrinking number of potential students switching to lifelong learning is actually a pretty smart move if i were a college let's have someone you know go through some form of associate degree certification community college system you know something similar to this but then be able to come back later in life and for some people it might be after they become parents even if you do enable that even if you get people into the workforce early you still have this huge cultural swing this sort of you massive narrative that specifically for women, when you just got access to higher education, you were just allowed, the gender pay gap is still a thing.

1:40:42We haven't even reached parity yet. So what, you're saying that you're going to give up this thing that you just got access to? It certainly seems at least with regards to career, that's one of the reasons the birth rate did decline, that they got access to education, but not employment. And then when they got through the higher education arrived into employment and weren't selected or promoted by what was still a pretty sort of misogynistic culture that didn't see women as in the same sort of equal way perhaps to be able to get them access into these uh higher paying jobs that they said well fuck this like i'm not even going to bother so i understand and it would be great to start people off early they don't need to stay in education as long i mean the american education system was it some 50 % of people that are leaving high school don't have like an eighth grade reading level and all this stuff.

1:41:28I don't think that you need to be in education this long to not get the results that you're supposed to be getting. We can definitely make changes there. But that's like, this is a huge multivariate problem. I have to guess that the countries that take this seriously earlier are going to be the ones that are going to benefit and the ones that don't are going to be very self-defeating. Yeah, and that's part of my frustration with Japan. I'm losing confidence in many countries. I've been able to talk to a lot of people who are in a position to do something about this. Government ministers, several prime ministers, presidents.

1:42:14I collaborate with the former president of Hungary and a non-profit to increase awareness of this worldwide. But yet, no one really yet is doing anything. But it's changing. So, your point about education, I want to come back to that if I can. Women's education. I mean, you already give the example that two out of three undergraduate students in the US are female. And I think men have a higher dropout rate as well. Well, you take Thailand. What percentage of women in Thailand get college degrees? 55%. Men, 30%. You have Thailand. So the idea that women have something to catch up on in terms of education, it looks like no longer the case.

1:43:07So I don't think it's a very good argument for people to say we're going to take education away from women necessarily if everyone shifts to lifelong learning. I'm talking about men and women shifting to lifelong learning. And again, why am I doing this? The comments I have from young people in particular I talk to at colleges, universities, speeches, the shock that they have such a low likelihood of becoming a parent in their 30s is so intense. I can see in their eyes, they're going to make the right decision for themselves. and very often that's going to be, do you know what? I don't really want to go to the office and report to a boss for 30 years and not have a child.

1:43:51I'm making sure I do that first. And, you know, I call myself a pan-natalist because I don't like being called pro-natalist and I'm certainly not anti-natalist. Pan-natalist meaning I support those who want to have children, to have the children they want to have and those people who don't want children not to have the children they don't want to have. So ultimately, you know, I'm on the fence in terms of what people actually choose. It's not my role to tell someone anything. But I think giving young people the information so they can sequence their lives, what is right for them, is part of the answer here.

1:44:27What happens to GDP of countries and the world if this continues? What happens to quality of life? Yeah. I want to get some big macro shit out there. Yeah. You know, GDP, you can talk about GDP, but that's going to shrink if there's fewer people. Then someone will say, well, it's GDP per person. That matters. You know, a number of people glide down. You know, what does it matter? Because there's going to be fewer and fewer of us anyway. But no, you see, the services that we provide through taxes are locked in at a much higher level. They cannot scale down because older people need more health care, need pensions.

1:45:06And in most nations, the pensions are paid in whilst people work go into the government kitty and are paid out to current retirees. So the idea that economically this will not hurt is simply wrong. And in terms of my biggest concern, and I don't know how we're going to figure this one out, is investment. Investment drives growth. Give a concrete example. Well, you know, 30 years ago, I studied an MBA. And the entire MBA was about growth markets. How to find a product that would grow, how to create a company that would grow, the importance of growth.

1:45:57And why does someone invest? Why does an individual invest? Why do pension funds invest? I think it's going to go up. It's going to go up. they don't invest because it's going to go down. So the appetite for investment in anything is, well, perhaps all people's products like diapers for the elderly for a time. So the appetite for investment, by definition for me, will reduce. And what can be called this degrowth model, or I like to call it retronomics, you know, retrofitting economies continually for an ever-shrinking size for diminishing returns, I don't know how that's going to work. And if you take away investment, what does that do to jobs?

1:46:40So people will say, well, sure, we haven't talked much about AI. Thank goodness AI is around, right? Robotics. Thank goodness we have some way of increasing productivity. Because, you know, one thing that isn't going to shrink with GDP is our national debts. Those are locked in. and by definition i did the numbers for the u.s very recently it might be no it's thousands of dollars per worker per year are paid in interest on the national debt and that number is only going up because the national debt's going up in the u.s like effectively every country now if there's a shrinking number of workers to pay that off what what happens to our next generation.

1:47:26So effectively what we've been doing as nations, and I don't think people have been doing this willingly, so I don't blame the boomers. I don't blame, it's just the reality of where we are. We were boring money against our future for the present. And it's the next generations who are going to have to burden that. Yeah, there's an embedded growth obligation. If you have an increasing debt, the assumption is at some point we'll outgrow our own debt. So growth has to occur in the future. this is the mad thing about the economics especially given that a lot of the pushback i think against talking about birthright decline comes from progressive leaning individuals who are very concerned with quality of life especially for people toward the bottom rung of society and inequality two things that they really care about or are supposed to really care about um well if you have a decreasing gdp if you have a worsening economic model what do you think that does to quality of life and who do you think it is that's going to be i'm going to be fine you're going to be fine all of the people that are educated and have wealth are largely going to be fine lots of problems as well but they're going to be more fine than the people who were relying very heavily on a social safety net that was paid into by taxes from an ever-dwindling workforce that's now being pulled up more by pensions and health care that needs to support old people and if you say well fucking hell at least we've got ai and robotics well what about the second thing that you're worried about, which is inequality?

1:48:48Who do you think is going to capture all of the economic gains from that? It's the 10 companies that own all of the chips and all of the compute and all of the AI systems and all of the robotics. Yeah, fucking Jason from an Nvidia is going to be fine. Sam from OpenAI is going to be swimming. But this decrease, it's the two things that progressive people are supposed to care about the most. As far as I can see, I'm totally open to being wrong. I am an idiot. But economically, those seem to be the two things that are going to be impacted the most. People at the bottom rung of society are going to be cared for less because there's fewer resources and more are taken by people who are older.

1:49:23And if you do rely on the one technology that could be a bit of an escape velocity to pull us out of this thing, where do you think those gains are going to be captured? They're not going to be redistributed down by these amazing companies. This company contributes 10 % of all productivity in the United States, this one robotics company or this one AI company. okay you now have the most powerful company in american history that's running this thing and this this is something that i wanted to get onto why do you think that talking about birth rate decline is right wing coded

1:49:59to me it's not from where i come come from um but you but you get the same accusations that i do right yeah for sure um so i think on one level there are people on the right who are aligned with the idea of family and you know i often their perspectives come from a good place often it's uh some religious perspective um so you do get this weight from the right I think where family is in some way prioritized, not just for religious reasons. But I think on the left, you have multiple ideologies that were linked in some way to the idea of exploding populations, too many people on the earth, et cetera.

1:50:50So, you know, on record saying you have a daughter and two sons and I will do everything for my daughter as much as my boys in terms of whatever I'm capable of. So in that sense, yeah, maybe a first wave feminist, or maybe a second wave, depending on how it's defined. Education is wonderful for women. Opportunities are wonderful. But there are waves of feminism out there that really, I think, are anti-motherhood. At their core, they don't understand or don't want to understand motherhood. And they will use things like the patriarchy. You know, women are only having children because men are forcing them to.

1:51:33I've literally had that stated in a debate. Despite the fact that four out of five women who fall off their reproductive window didn't intend to not be childless. And then they start getting accusational about, oh, you're using the wrong survey, and they kind of have all this fuzzy data to try and support that. But there are these ideologies, therefore, that are threatened by the idea that actually 90 % of people want women. That's just people on the right. That's the right, the middle, and the left. And then you have environmentalists, which may be, I don't know, maybe more left-centered often, who have been indoctrinated in some cases.

1:52:15I think it is that, that we need less people on the planet because we can't possibly sustain the idea of people having families and simply polluting the earth less. so you you have the left i think that's going through this exercise of trying to remap its prior views on many things like you know gender pay gap uh the environment and many other things but um it's changing and it has to change because the left will be left behind well let's not let's not forget the democratic national convention had free vasectomies happening outside of it I didn't know that. Free vasectomies in a van, like a bus, like a vasectomy bus.

1:53:01Open to being told that this was right. But I mean, this was reported fucking everywhere. So I'm downstream of a lot of people reporting incorrectly, if that's the case. I know what you're about to say. Anyone that's taken the behavioral genetics red pill understands that your political ideology is at least partly heritable. That means that the children of left-leaning parents are more likely to be left-leaning themselves because they have a personality inherited from their parents, which is independent from the environment that they were brought up in, which predisposes them also to left-leaning beliefs.

1:53:30This means if you are anti-natalist, but also pro-progressive, you are self-defeating. That is ideological fucking seppuku, right? Because you have to assume that in the future, the pro-natalist ideologies, subcultures, groups of people, the religious, the conservative, conservative the fucking amish they're fine look at israel right like you know there are small pockets that are fine i imagine but they're in a overall decreasing vitality curve who do you think inherits the future who do you think inherits the future culturally ideologically religiously politically if you really care i mean it's a difficult argument to be made like if you really care about progressivism you should turn against all the people that are progressive that say you shouldn't have kids and you should start having kids.

1:54:19But the future will be inherited by the children of the people who have children, shock, horror, and they will be predisposed to a particular type of ideology based on this. And I'm like, am I fucking high here? Like, does nobody else see this? You are saying we care about democratic ideals. The DNC is here to help move America forward in the right direction. But this denial of the fact that heritability is something that even exists in behavioral genetics is like fucking pseudoscience. Sure. We can see how long that gets you moving through the future. You're encouraging your supporters to cease themselves from being able to have kids.

1:55:07So in terms of who inherits the earth, it's interesting you mentioned the Amish. it's interesting you mentioned Israel Israel I know a bit about I imagine that Amish are have very low childlessness rates probably larger families but also I imagine that their vitality curve I imagine they have their own and it's way left shifted because people are starting families younger yeah they've got cultural cohesion right Israel doesn't have cultural cohesion and I haven't been to Israel I've been Certainly who'd like to go at some point. But you can see in the data, there's more than one Israel because 15 % of mothers there are having six or more children, but you also have 20 % childlessness.

1:55:57So you can see, okay, there's multiple vitality curves inside Israel. So who will inherit the earth? It's going to be those groups of people who have a vitality curve that is less shifted towards probably the average age of motherhood being 25 or less. and the challenge therefore I think if if we are if the conservatives are to get a little bit smug saying well we will inherit the earth that's only true if conservatives start having children younger if you're saying we're going to have more children, but you're still keeping your vitality curve at age 30, this is effectively a law of nature. You're not going to match with the person you wanted to match for all the reasons we've already talked about.

1:56:39So it comes down to, you know, you talked about a movement earlier. You know, it's not, individuals cannot change this. Yeah, yeah. It has to be coordinated. It has to be coordinated. Yeah. And I don't mean coordinated, someone's going to twist this, that we want some coordinated, you know, parenting. It's the same as the unfortunate term, enforced monogamy. we're talking about encouraged monogamy not coerced monogamy we're talking about encouraged vitality curve not enforced vitality curve yes and yeah and i think again it can happen because i i get sent photographs of babies quite a lot of people watch the documentary it's heartwarming um you know i've i was at the arc event in london uh speaking there this year and this lady came with a pram, ran up to me and said, yeah, I wanted to show you my baby, I wanted to show you my baby.

1:57:30It tells me that once people are aware of the risks of delayed parenthood, I mean, that's another way of expressing it, it's a risk of delayed parenthood, that this movement will naturally happen. It has to be natural. That people, and then the left has a challenge of what do they do? And we're already seeing that one of the most heartening moments to me was earlier this year They're in Porto. There's an organization called the OSCE, Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, 57 nations. They have a parliamentary assembly, 350 members, includes the US, Canada, every European nation, North African nations, and East as far as Mongolia.

1:58:15And a demographic resolution was added to the overall declaration. I was able to give a speech and meet some of these politicians the day before. It passed unanimously. Left, center, and right. What was the demographic resolution? It was that we need to take seriously what you and I are talking about and accept that we have got a demographic challenge, support people who want their children better than we're doing now, increase awareness amongst younger people in terms of education, the fertility curve, et cetera, et cetera. and to see that resolution pass unanimously. I was speechless and heartened at actually, no.

1:58:58Well, yeah, but that's at the macro level. That's at the level of countries that are able to stare down the barrel of economic shrinkage in the face of climbing debt, that are going to be looking at infrastructure being increasingly relied upon by an old population, fewer young people, towns that are just completely abandoned. This was the craziest thing that you taught me one of the times that we spoke. It might have even been in Qatar when we did that. Me and you were there having breakfast over the top of this big courtyard. And I was like, well, what happens to a country if the population decreases?

1:59:31Do you just end up with half the number of people in each town? You said, no, no, no, no. You end up with the same number of people. Manhattan's going to have 8 million people. But there's going to be towns everywhere that have no one. Because the infrastructure has to, it's more economically efficient to do it that way. just on the environment point that you made before. A new paper argues that reducing the size of the human population would have close to zero effect on climate change. A baby born today will have a similar carbon footprint than one born a decade or two ago, and their kids' carbon footprints will be even smaller.

2:00:00As a result of population momentum, population numbers won't decline for several generations, and by the time they do, people's carbon footprints may be negligible anyway. The authors estimate that population reduction would lower global temperatures by 0.05 degrees Celsius compared to population stabilization. Yeah. And there's another fact as well, which is if you decide today, as a young person, you're not going to have a child because of the environment, well, your child actually doesn't start contributing to emissions at all until I think it's mid-20s is really when they start to become economically productive.

2:00:39We're already living in a planet that is past peak child. We're already on the way down. So for me, it is just a fool's game to try and think that not having children, given that the vast majority of people want them and often desperately want them, I think it's a fool's game to bring the environment into this, unless you're an anti-Natalist and decide to spin this in some way. Yeah, you're using a lie about the impact on climate, that population reduction would be 0.05 degrees Celsius, unless you're using, lying about those stats, and then saying that we shouldn't have kids because of the environment, because people believe that.

2:01:16And then that is the way to sneak your antenatalist policy in under the guise of being caring about the climate. So on this exact topic, the worst ever chart I have seen in science. Okay. You know, in future, I'm into data, as you may have guessed, and in future, I'd love to see a museum of data science. And I said before that, you know, in the basement, there would be the naughty room, you know, the... Bad data. Cellar for bad data. And then the center would be this one chart. And on the chart, you've got these small circles, the impact of one flight a year, the impact of, you know, driving 100 kilometers, all these things, They're all little circles, let's say grape size.

2:02:00And then you have this giant grapefruit in the center, the effect of having one child. And then you read the footnotes and it's from some study and you go to that study and it's based on another study. And what they did was work out the cost of a child's emissions over their entire lifetime, plus the fact that they were assumed to have two children. So their children's emissions and their children's children and their children's children's children's children. And they lump them all together. So it's one flight or the entirety of your future. Your dynasty for the next couple of hundred years. And this was published in The Guardian and many, many other.

2:02:39Can you do, you evaded it earlier on and I have to assume that was because of something that was diplomatic. You have to know the numbers. Based on current fertility rates and your predicted decline, what do the next few decades and the next couple of centuries look like in terms of total global population? Yeah, I did evade it because I try and stay away from total headcounts. Yeah, sorry. I'm going to keep my foot on you here. Sure. So. Without interventions, without changes. Yeah. I think we're going to peak 10 billion-ish. When's that, about 2100? No, but I think sooner than, I think 2060 is really, I think the rate of decline when you see what's happening in India, when you see what's happening in sub-Saharan Africa is much faster than expected.

2:03:28And we're then going to go through a period of not rapid decline at all because there will be more people living longer. That will continue. Flat, flat, flat, flat, flat, flat, flat, flat. There we go. And when does that start to happen? Oh, I mean, if you're interested, and I'm not sure why anybody would necessarily be focused on total headcount in the year 2100, but it's going to be that far out. And I say that because at that time, so many people are going to be old retirees unless we have some technology to, well, we may well do. Reinvigorate. A hundred-year-olds might be having kids, but then we might be in a whole new world, but we're really into a world of science fiction there that we can't imagine.

2:04:09So for me, there's a number I like to share, and it's in my paper. It's the societal half-life, SHL. And I think it should be stated every time a birth rate is coded. So South Korea, I mentioned it earlier, South Korea's birth rate of around 0.75 now, I believe, means a societal half-life of 20 years. So births are going to half every 20 years, but then eventually everything will half. The economy will half. The number of consumers will half. The number eventually of old people will half. But by that time, the number of children will have halved again, probably several times. Most of the developed world, including the US, are going to be halving in terms of births every 50 to 60 years.

2:04:51uh china it's probably 40 years right now that to me when i talk to to mayors and governments around the world i think is more meaningful that you know what you're planning now for infrastructure for tax base for whatever it is is going to half in this and of course it's not like you you wait 50 years and suddenly it halves that path is starting now and of course immigration comes into it. And just to cover that, I'm a migrant myself, so are you in a sense. I'm certainly not against migration. I think each country's got its own entire right to decide the level of immigration that's right for them and what context.

2:05:34In Japan, it's very low. That's changing quite rapidly. Other nations like the US, historically, it's been relatively high. But the idea that you can patch over birth rate decline with immigration is another fool's game. So you take a nation right now that becomes dependent on fresh workers because its birth rate is so low, like Germany, Italy, for many decades now. You get to a situation eventually where those retirees, those immigrants will retire, of course. And you need to look after them, of course. They need taken care of like everybody else. So what do you need with falling birth rates?

2:06:15More immigrants. who then get older. So the number of old people will never decrease. The one thing you might say is a benefit to Japan, the number of old people will eventually decrease. So maybe you accept, okay, we need perpetual migration. From where? You know, another - Coming from Brazil. Well, India's going to need its own immigrants very soon. I mean, we're already at a point where there are ghost towns in India. Yeah. of people living alone. And the competition for migrants, especially perhaps the ones that most countries would best like to have, the younger, the more able, the more educated, countries will be offering free housing.

2:06:59Maybe they are already in some cases, you could argue, for people to come to simply support their decaying societies. Two things that we haven't spoken about. IVF, can that not fix this problem? and the second one adoption he's saying people good yeah i've never had a drink like this before that's a element so it's um it's good it's like electrolytes sodium potassium magnesium it's salty but yeah it is it's a weird you know this is the inverse of uh birth rate decline um because it's so salty and nice and sweet you want to drink more of it but as you drink more of it you want to drink more of it so it's this very strange yeah it's good it's really good for you natural sweetener.

2:07:41It's fantastic. Total carbs, 1%. Very good. IVF, adoption. Well, adoption, we can maybe cover that first because it's an easy one. In the US, as you've seen this episode of the documentary, I'm releasing a full feature-length version of the documentary, simply called Birth Gap. It's covering part one and the whole thing through. And in it, you see adoption experts say that in the US, for every adoptable infant, there are 30 parents wanting to adopt, 30 to one. You have situations. That's pairs of parents, 30 families. Yeah, 30 families. So the chance of adopting an infant, and the quote from the expert was that people giving away an infant for adoption these days is a very rare thing.

2:08:34Most people are having the children they want to have, which was not the case decades ago. Then you have other regulations, certainly I imagine for good reason, where in some states in the US that children are not allowed to be formally adopted until, for example, eight years old. Why? Because reconciliation is promoted. The parents who are perhaps drug addicts or divorced and have no money or whatever it is may change their minds, or so might family members. So they're put into foster homes until that age. So now you're adopting an eight-year-old. I guess most people would prefer to adopt a younger child.

2:09:17Then you look at international adoption. International adoption is down over 80 % in recent years. Many countries in Africa, Latin America, have closed their borders to international adoption. What do you mean by that is poor countries exporting children, doing the Angelina Jolie thing. Yeah. And it all happened when there were some horrendous cases where I think it might have been, if I recall, Russian babies were being brought to the US and in one or maybe two cases, horrendous things happened to those babies. Russia shut its borders first, I believe. And then many countries decided, you know, we can look after our own infants because countries, you know, including Latin America, now have a birth rate crisis.

2:10:01Don't export your kids if you've got few young people. Right. And if you've got parents who are unable, will come on to IVF, unable to have children because they've tried IVF and it's not working. So the idea of international adoption, the idea of... Now, if you want to adopt, I didn't include this in the current documentary, but I have a lot of footage and I may release it at some point. If you want to adopt in the US, there are children who are adoptable. That's 13. Probably. but even infants but probably they're black and I know white parents have adopted black kids but probably their parent was a drug addict living under a bridge and I'm not just saying that gosh if anybody wants to call me a racist I'm the wrong person to do that so please don't go there this is from adoption experts and from families who have adopted because black kids tend to be poorer there is a higher incidence I believe of drug abuse and unfortunately there is a higher likelihood of a black child being given up for adoption whose mother may have been a drug addict.

2:11:09So the idea of adoption and so many people in the documentary saying, oh, I'll just adopt. Oh, if I can have a child later in life, I'll just adopt. That's fantasy. Not available. They're not anywhere. No. And they're going to be decreasingly anywhere as well. Yes, absolutely. IVF. You know, this is, I know people close to me who have had children, wonderful children through IVF. So you have to say it's wonderful. But there's a sad story, and I shared a little bit of it earlier, which is when you look at the vitality curve, there's no uptick in people having children later. So there's more people having children in their 40s, but overall, the likelihood of having a child at some point in life has gone down.

2:11:58So what we're not seeing, and I've heard it from multiple fertility doctors, again, the documentary, the horrendous reality of having to tell parents who've gone through the challenges of IVF. IVF's not easy. You get pumped full of hormones. And you... Sometimes in multiple rounds. In multiple rounds. It's expensive. Absolutely. With no guarantee of success. For doctors having to tell people who've gone through that, that it's failed. and people having to make the decision to give up is harrowing. But there's another group of people as well, which is those people who get to age 38, 40, 45 and don't have a partner.

2:12:49And I feel tired. It's just things didn't line up. I've got eggs but not sperm. And then if I do want to do this with a sperm donor into my eggs, I'm going to be on my own. this wasn't the vision that i had for my family in any case didn't my intention wasn't just to have kids my intention was to have a family yeah that's right and you know very often again coming from fertility experts women later in life into their 40s are quite probably using donor eggs fucking hell and donor sperm so this was at least a couple of interventions that i thought I wrote a newsletter post a couple of weeks ago about the Cassandra complex, about being right but early, the pain of being right but early.

2:13:34And I think that birthright is one of the things that mean you are right but early on. Not being right but early on that much stuff, but this is one of the ones that I'd bet a pretty good amount of money on. And interestingly, like most things that you're right but early on, first off, you don't actually know. Except for with demography, you do. We know how many one-year-olds there are. So I'm prepared to bet a good bit of the house on this thing being a good. I don't understand how a shrinking population can't be a big deal. I don't understand how it can't be bad economically, culturally, politically, socially, in terms of mental health for individuals, in terms of social cohesion, in terms of war and peace across the world.

2:14:09All of these things, whether you're from the right or from the left, progressive, all of this, whatever it is that you care about, declining birth rates are probably going to impact it. I wrote this thing about stuff that I'm right, but early on. And I wrote about the difference between Copernicus and Galileo. Do you know this story? No. Brilliant. So Copernicus realizes that maybe the Earth isn't the center of the sun, but he holds off from publishing his sort of groundbreaking work until basically his deathbed, and he sort of whispers it out, essentially. A hundred years later, a hundred years later, Galileo has the same insight, realizes that maybe the idea that everything circles around us isn't true, and he publishes it straight away.

2:14:53What happens? He's castigated by the church. He's forced to recant. He lives the rest of his life basically under house arrest. So what you see is the pain of somebody who's right but early. And the difference between Copernicus and Galileo is Copernicus was able to foresee the problem of being a Cassandra. He was like, I shouldn't talk about this, I shouldn't. And the crazy thing is the people who are enforcing the restriction, the judgment, the castigation of anybody who decides to talk about this stuff are just straight up limiting. They are causing and inflicting future suffering on all of the different dynamics that I've mentioned that.

2:15:39So I've decided to, after I'd gone through all of these examples from history, germ theory of disease, the guy died in an asylum. The lady who discovered DDT was mocked. I was like, right, I better put some skin in the game. Like what are the things that I think that I'm right, but early on. And one of the things that I thought would be a positive social norm would be encouraging women at 21 to freeze their eggs. and it's expensive, it's difficult, it's all of those things. And it does not fix the problem entirely. It only fixes one small dynamic of it. But I think the more that, you know, because this is going to be richer girls.

2:16:20I mean, actually, currently it's 15 grand. So like, you know, you've got to have a pretty rich family to be getting a 15 grand 21 year old birthday present, but some people get cars and all the rest of it and stuff like that. It's like, okay maybe you pull 18 19 20 21 together and you do this thing um i think that the more that there are movements like that the more that they are linchpin moments that people hook into and think more seriously about fertility overall that start to think about it earlier why am i freezing my eggs i'm pumping oh fuck that's why because it's a big deal and because if it goes wrong it goes wrong in a big way i am i'm not sure i exactly agree with that about egg freezing at 21 anymore i did think that um but i worry that in doing so it encourages people to wait encourage and then they don't know the partner we're back into yeah i did foresee that i thought you would say that i frankly i just don't have an answer i just i'm you know not all of my ideas are going to be winners here, Stephen.

2:17:20But the thing, you know, and again, going back to why being early was important to me, and maybe also to you in this context, it starts people talking about the topic. When we did the first podcast, people weren't talking about this in their classrooms, in their homes, with their friend groups at all. I was at an event in Europe, an EU event, and we were being bussed to an evening dinner. It was linked to this OSCE event in Porto. And I hadn't sit close to this 21-year-old young woman who wanted to know a little bit about what I did. And I wasn't a politician that interested her because almost everybody was.

2:18:05And I mentioned the documentary. I said, you know, I'd love to come along sometime if you have a political event. So we talk about this all the time. This isn't new anymore. We're talking about birth rates constantly. And I think what, you know, starting to talk of whether it's about egg freezing or IVF or the GDP, we've given people, in a sense, an open door to actually start talking about a problem that otherwise I think was a very private thing. Yeah, well, it is, right? Talking about your choices for starting a family, it feels like a very individual decision. It feels like something that you have a lot of agency over.

2:18:44It feels like this is my choice. But based on the fact that the vitality curve has shifted and there hasn't been a staunch group of 21-year-olds that have just kept this peak in there, well, it shows that it's actually not, you don't have as much volition over this as you said. And you're right. Like you choose if you are going to not have children. That is something that you choose. But you can't, it's going to be much more difficult to choose to have children, especially as a man. We're going to get an egg donor for your sperm and a surrogate from, and I'm going to raise this child on my own as a solo father.

2:19:14like that you know this crazy world so uh i guess a couple of other things ivg in vitro gametogenesis okay so this is um taking cells from anywhere on the body you can then turn into pluripotent stem cells you can then turn into eggs that you can then fertilize so what you do there is it permits you if you also uh move in artificial wombs you can basically from like i'm not sure if it's quite skin cells but basically any scale any cell on the body go through a sequence turn that into an egg cell then fertilize that with the surplus of sperm that's floating around uh and then if you have the artificial womb too away you go you basically have like you know the matrix where it's just banks and banks and banks of humans uh you do that i mean we're really getting into sci-fi territory here but yeah yes but i i can already answer that statistically given the data set of 300 million mothers going back decades where IVF and technology started to creep in and there's no dent on the vitality curve.

2:20:25So it tells me there's something more powerful and the only thing that explains this curve is pair bonding being in a stable relationship where two people are on the same page at the same time. So no matter what you've got in terms of IVG or surrogate opportunities, I think surrogate parent, not surrogate, I beg your pardon, artificial incubation, this idea that we can kind of soon, it won't be soon. Test your baby our way through. Yeah. I have yet to meet a mother who has told me that she would consider remotely being pregnant, I think, is something with these challenges that is important to women.

2:21:08And the idea, well, I'll just, you know. Louise has this wonderful line where she says, pregnancy doesn't just make a child, it makes a mother. Right, right, right. And probably in many ways, psychologically, as well as biologically. Correct. Yeah. So when it comes to interventions, what are the ones that don't work? Everything. Not quite true. But, you know. Give me the top things that people throw at you. What about, what about, what about, what about, what are the things that just, no. Yeah, this is, you know, I talk in different countries and the thing that is evident to me is that people are convinced that their own local grievance is the reason people are having fewer children.

2:21:54So I was at a technology conference in Japan, unusual to speak at a technology conference but industries are now starting to worry about low birth rates and this was a topic they wanted to hear about i thought i did a really good job of explaining to this japanese audience that work-life balance or having men rather do more in the home would not change japan's birth rates because if you look at scandinavia where men already do a lot, lot more in the home, birth rates are pretty much as low as Japan. And to me, that's evidence. It's like you cannot just say, okay, this local solution is based on this if it's not working somewhere else in the world.

2:22:41But it kind of broke my heart afterwards. This lady came up to me and said, yes, but Stephen really amended more here. We'd be fine with birth rates. So I think there is this tendency for people to focus on what, so in the UK right now, where it's come from, it's house prices, but that's a regional thing in the UK. You go to the areas of the UK with the lowest birth rates, like Scotland, and you don't have the same house price issue that you have in London. So people, I think, have got this tendency to blame, I was calling it the local grievance razor, like an extension to Occam's razor where the simplest explanation is usually the correct one.

2:23:24For me, it's a case of, well, the local grievance is probably not the explanation to a global or widespread phenomenon. So you can go through all of those. Because this wouldn't explain, if it was based on the UK saying it's because of housing and Japan saying it's because of men helping around the home and Scandinavia saying it's because of cost of living and the US saying it's because of gun control or whatever it is. If that's the case, why is every country so reliably decreasing at the same rate in the same sort of way at the same kind of time? And now with a vitality curve that can be predicted without knowing any of those things.

2:24:01So for me, that's proof positive. But the vitality curve does reveal what for me is more than a glimmer of hope and it comes back to Hungary, a country we've got to know pretty well. It's cited a lot because of its increased birth rates, but it's not criticized because birth rates in recent year or two have been falling again. I don't care. This idea, this total fertility rate, this average woman really masks so much relevant information. If you look at births by age in Hungary, the policies from around 2010 right the way through for about 12, 14 years, did one remarkable thing. There was a bubble of young people starting to become parents.

2:24:51So you had like a bimodal vitality curve. And that is a real outlier for me. So you then look at Hungary and what might they have been doing. Well, Hungary has dozens of policies. some are interesting a woman under 30 having a child will have her college tuition cancelled no college fees a family who wants to or a couple who wants to have a family can get effectively a deposit for an apartment or a house and that deposit increases whether you're going to have one, two, three or four children there's also this famous thing perhaps in the media where a woman having it was four children I believe it's now two will pay no income tax for life.

2:25:39But the one that I think is most interesting in all of that is helping young people get housing in Hungary. I think that caused enough young people who were in a stable relationship at a younger age to think, Let's do it. Why not? You know, in a way that in many other nations, that just isn't part of the psyche. So Hungary certainly hasn't solved its crisis at all, but it's a signal of hope. But the irony of this, and people are going to hate me saying this, but from the data, so I'm going to blame the data. What we have to do is put all our efforts on the young. We almost have to take all the incentives away from the over 30s having children and put everything into, well, you know, I've cited 25-year-old is the optimal age and people look at me as if that's impossible.

2:26:33But I'm looking at data here. The more we can do to help younger people have stability. So back to economic vulnerability, having some framework that gives them security to know that, well, I've got a good employer. I am allowed to take this extended period off. I love the idea of young people having a career. that's more and more the gig economy of course so it's not for everybody necessarily but let's say joining an employer and you take your three five years off most likely a mother but could be a father i guess um but you're still an employee you still have the business card you still have the email you still go to the christmas parties or whatever party the company throws you still do training you might still work on and off you still feel part of that company and you come back age 32 and with retirement become being pushed out you still can work for 40 years 570 yeah exactly yeah i have i wonder about the sort of personal social choices that people are making i saw i want to say gss data maybe or some other survey that looked at um why is it that you don't have kids yet.

2:27:56And a lot of people were talking about just working on myself at the moment, don't feel ready. So it was a personal choice. So what we have, at least when it comes to people's trying to nudge this vitality curve, when you ask people, they're like, I don't want to have kids yet. I don't want to have kids yet. And what you're trying to do is get people to work out what them in a decade would have wanted them at 25 to have done. Now, if that was easy to do, nobody would ever cheat on their diet. Like you eat the cookie now because it tastes good now, even if in future, retrospectively, you wish that you hadn't.

2:28:36Tomorrow, I wish I hadn't had that fast food. Today, I do want the fast food. I do what I want now. Like we hyperbolically discount. We can't win the marshmallow test every single day. The challenges and issues of the restrictions of having kids in a world that has got more opportunity than ever before, more distractions than ever before. We've got Netflix and TikTok and porn and video games and travel, got interconnected world. I can go and, you know, backpack around Bali and Thailand. I can't do that with a kid. So you tell me I'm going to stop doing all of these things now that I want to do now to do something that I don't want to do now.

2:29:10I genuinely do not want to have a kid at age 23 because the world is different to how it used to be. The world is different to how it was a few decades ago, where there were fewer things to do. Maybe the most fun, most engaging, best thing that I could have done was have a kid. But there's other things for me to do now. And you're telling me that I'm not going to do the thing that I want to do now to do the thing that me in the future might want to do, probably will want to do. But I don't know that now. So I give up the thing that I know for the thing that is uncertain or the thing that I don't know I will want.

2:29:42Give up the thing I do want for the thing I don't know I will want. I love this. There's so many different points to make. One I'll make so I don't forget is that there are so many younger parents I meet, maybe my age, whose kids are all grown up, who are now touring the world doing all the amazing things when they're able to do things that they wouldn't have been able to do in the 20s. The idea that everything has to be crammed in to our younger years, I think, has to be questioned. And maybe people my generation should be sharing more of that. But to me, everything you've just said makes sense in two contexts.

2:30:21One, those people who really don't have the desire for kids. You know, they just, and it is pretty, I believe it's binary. And people are going to challenge that. So maybe it's not perfectly binary, but it does seem, and the people I've met, you either do or you want them one day. Now, so you look at the category then who are saying like, you're suggesting in many cases, well, not now. I want this vacation now. I want this new iPhone now. Career, yeah, absolutely.

2:30:50You better inform people, I'm going to say that because it's based on data. You tell that person that you've got a 15 % chance of, so I'm going to launch an app. I wasn't going to announce this here because it's not ready yet. I don't want someone to beat me to it, but if they do, that's fine. Imagine an app where you tell the app where you're located. Austin, London, Tokyo. What age are you? What age would you ideally want to start a family? 35. Okay, for Tokyo, the probability of having a child at 35 is 7%. For men and women. We have this data now. We can tell people. going to be a very popular app.

2:31:36I've registered datrace.com because I think it is a race. datrace.com. Yeah, it doesn't exist. datrace.com is one letter away from a really, really delicate word. Okay, your mind works a different way. I worked in nightlife for a long time. Okay, all right. Well, maybe I'll rethink that. Yeah. You can maybe cut that out. I'll do some. No, no, no, no, keep it. But I just, I caution you that datrace.com. Also, perilouslyclosedodate.com and daterace.com. I'm like, date what race? All right, just come to birthcap.org. Yes, birthcap.org. But the point really is, though, that, again, I've seen it with my own eyes so many times.

2:32:21Once you tell those people the likelihood of becoming a parent, especially as a woman, then you can see the shift. Actually, that's a good point. Let's say that we've done nearly three hours on this, which added on to the other thing in the documentary. People got a lot to watch, right? They're going to go watch the Birth Gap documentary, which will be out by the time that this comes out. Just search Birth Gap on YouTube. Go and watch the first conversations that we've had. A lot for people to take in. Let's say that someone has been compelled by this three-hour treatise. What, if they're going to try and convince a friend to take it seriously beyond listen to the podcast, watch the documentary.

2:33:00And obviously you're trying to do this a lot. You're trying to convince people to take seriously their personal choice when it comes to maybe thinking about having kids sooner, right? I would guess that's a way to summate what it is that you're trying to achieve. Yeah. Without coercion, just to think about it. Yes. Think about this thing more seriously. Yes. What are the most compelling one-liners, few one-liners? What is the Thanksgiving table pitch that people should be giving to their friends and family? I think we've covered quite a few facts here that would be perfect for Thanksgiving. You know, 80 % of people without children had planned to become parents one day.

2:33:37That, you know, by age 30, at most, a woman have a 50 % chance of ever becoming a mother. I mean, those are really topical things and are quite shocking to a lot of people. But I think there's an opportunity beyond this for younger people, men actually.

2:34:04My experience on multiple corners around this globe is that there are multiple women who really want to become mothers enough to consider it much earlier than would otherwise happen. And they're waiting for Mr. Kind of Quite Right. Maybe not perfect. Nothing's perfect. Mr. Quite Right. Yeah, quite right. And to a young man who may even have checked out or been embarrassed at being rejected multiple times, I would be dropping that line in, whatever you can, you know, just asking someone, do they want to? Oh, God. Wow. Did you know that 80 % of... Yeah. Well, maybe that's a little bit direct and crude, but the point is I would persist because the more and more people who start to understand, there's a thing today, young people are learning more and more called life design.

2:35:06Have you heard of life design? Came out of Stanford in the 90s. Basically, it's telling young people you can have whatever you want to design your life. Okay. And interestingly, there's a branch of evolutionary biology or some form of biology called life history. Strange word, life history. It's looking at a species and saying typically what actually happens in terms of when species reproduce, when they age, what they do in terms of do chimpanzees look after their grandchildren, yes or no? How does that all work? and for me i want to put life design and life history together for humans look at the reality of what tends to happen to young people in terms of that curve the probability of having a child at a certain age against your aspirations and i think the more young people figure out that you can't have it all it's a lie you can have certainty about having it all you might be very lucky and get it all but your sister might have managed to get it all right and the more they have it all the you know the greater the likelihood that others won't you know the idea of things lining up is is mostly a medication travel career fulfillment family on time before it's too late with the right person at the right time.

2:36:33It's mostly, it's a myth to suggest that there's a high likelihood of that for anyone. And once I think people start to, from data again, understand what these realities are, I think the psyche will change. And my point to young men is don't give up. I know there are women out there. This comes back to what I was just saying before, that it is about trade-offs. it is about well i know what i want and i know what i can get right now i can get i have much more agency over my own career over my own education one of the reasons i think that people prioritize careers over relationships is that a career can never leave you you can only choose to leave it a partner is not quite the same there's a level of um existential investment of romantic investment that is not within your control in a world where people are dealing with more anxiety and uncertainty, depression than ever before.

2:37:29I think that it tends us to go for things that are safer and it's just a sexier talking point. Like there is really easily a way to look at every single thing. If you take a very, very low resolution view, there is a super easy way for somebody to look at the entire conversation that we've had today and say, this is just men telling you to not embrace your freedom in the modern world. and it takes much longer than that one sentence to rebut that one sentence what that means is there's an asymmetry sort of with the battle of ideas that we've got going on here yeah but ultimately we've started a conversation and i think people will make up their own mind that person lecturing telling someone they can have it all when we start challenging that, and that's never really happened before, challenging that saying, look at all these childless women grieving in tears about their lost dreams.

2:38:31Men too. And here's the actual raw data that shows right now in the US, a woman who wants to have children has basically got a 60 % chance of becoming a mother in the US. Only six out of 10 people will do. So I think I no longer care about, I've only been canceled once, but it was enough to see that the views in the documentary went up 100 ,000 from the media coverage that got. So I don't mind at all about the naysayers, the challengers. So the asymmetry, I think, comes the way. Well, ultimately, you know, unless you're going to misrepresent either stats or intentions, the power lies with what's true.

2:39:20And again, with demography, this is one of the things, even with regards to climate change, we understand where the climate is now, but we're only using prediction models to work out how that's going to affect things in future. Demography may be the most accurate in terms of, we don't know what the financial market's going to do in the future. We don't understand what's going to happen to cloud formation. We don't understand what's going to happen to sea levels. We know how many one-year-olds we've got. We know how many one-year-olds we've got, which means, yeah, you don't know how long people are going to live, but you can't make any more one-year-olds or two-year-olds or three-year-olds or 15-year-olds.

2:39:55So we know how many 75-year-olds will be maximum in the year 2100. This is the limit. Yeah, because they're being born this year. They can't be anymore. That's right. Yes. And yet it surprises me greatly is that organizations, publications are in some form of denial. So the UN came up with some projections. It's been on X quite a lot this past week about likely scenarios of future population levels of the planet based on birth rates. And they've got these different scenarios, best case, mid case, worst case in terms of birth rates. But every single one of them assumes that birth rates will go back up to 2.0.

2:40:30When? When? they just over the century, oh, there's no rationale for it. It's just, well, they must do. Oh, this is... So the worst case scenario still assumes a best case scenario. Way better than anybody that's actually looking at the data or understanding the mechanisms of this would think. Yes. And part of it I get, the Economist came out with an article this week saying basically don't panic about low birth rates. Sure, we shouldn't be panicking, but we got to be realist about it. Things will change. I disagree. I disagree entirely. I think it's perfectly right to panic about low birth rates.

2:41:11I am. I'm a pretty even keel guy. I haven't got involved in many sort of big social movements. I've largely been an only child energy adult infant until pretty much now. I cared about some stuff to do with mating because I was worried about loneliness and people not coupling up. I got worried about AI safety and the alignment, problem. I got worried about that about eight years ago or so, and that's still something that's a big part of my concern. I'm worried about existential risks more generally, pandemics, bioweapons, including climate change, although it's on a longer, more protracted timeline.

2:41:44But this is the first one that really has huge global implications. And I'm sure that everybody, even the people from fucking Heaven's Gate, that were sure this asteroid was coming over, and we're going to, you know, this is going to destroy the earth or, you know, people that thought that in 2021 or whenever it was that the earth was going to be destroyed, all of this stuff, like everybody from the inside of some inaccurate cult believes that they're telling the truth, but none of them have got the level of certainty and data that demographers do. So it kind of comes back to raw stats. And that's why, you know, I would love to get you to sit down with Louise Perry.

2:42:24I'd love to get you to sit down with Brad Wilcox and, you know, the Collinses and have a conversation where we thrash this sort of stuff out because I think they've got important elements to contribute to this. What are the mechanisms that are going on? What are we seeing with regards to relating and culture? What was the change with regards to the pill with the sexual revolution with, you know, all of these sorts of things, hypergamy, changes in socioeconomic status. But first and foremost, demography is about maths and that's where you come from. And I think that that's why you're an important voice with this.

2:42:53I think though, to be fair, there's many branches of demography. And perhaps the biggest part is like social. It's a branch of sociology, looking at societies and why things happen. And I've been at events speaking where I've been pulled aside by other speakers from a world more aligned with sociology saying, Stephen, what are you doing? Why are you telling people this? Why are you panicking people? Because it's in the data and it's our future. And I care about young people and it's true. Yeah, but we shouldn't be panicking people. So I think, not all, clearly, but many voices in academia

2:43:37have a level of responsibility. I mean, we've known this, you're right, demography is about numbers. Those numbers have been on the books. Birth rates fell in 1970. You only need to look at the justifications for this. just compare Galileo and Copernicus, right? Very few people, especially you're in academia. This is very unpopular. The advantage and the reason that I can talk about this even more than you is that most of my friends, they don't hold particularly staunch beliefs that I'm going to be ostracized for going against with regards to me saying that I think population is going to go down and it's maybe not a good thing for pretty much everybody.

2:44:16I'm not going to be kicked out of the hallowed halls of the canteen for doing that. But people inside of academia are people inside of government are, you know, the, the, the repercussions, if you're inside of an institution like that, are much bigger. And the advantage that you and I have is that we're on the outside of the tent pissing in. Yeah. And yeah, that's right. I, like I say, you can, I'm, I'm fired up about this thing. I think it's, I think it's super important. Uh, the first conversation that we had sort of red pilled me, this one's given me enough to think about for another fucking three goes um what should people do what what do you think that people should do if they want to educate themselves further on this thing i mean there is good news here when i started making the documentary my first assumption was that people just didn't want kids and i was expecting to conclude that you know what we just gotta prepare for the wind down you know understanding that for some decades, a century or so, we were going to go through this painful phase.

2:45:23Contraction. Yeah. Yes. Contraction, but not an elegant contraction at all. Crash. Contraction. Yeah. Yeah. The sort of compression. Collapse. I mean, it's collapse. It's what it is on many levels. And that's not the case. I mean, what I learned consistently, surprisingly, is that mothers are having the same kids as decades ago in Japan and parts of Europe, young women are having the same number of kids, if they have the first one, as their grandmother's generation. So it's nothing to do with parentage or motherhood. It's these waves of childlessness that kicked in and then this unplanned childlessness element.

2:46:02So the reality is there's an easy fix if we can just solve the unplanned childlessness crisis. And how do we do that? Well, we know how now. We just got to enable people. We've got to increase the vitality curve and the only way to do that, it's pretty clear from the data, is for the average age of parenting to be younger. So then all we have to do is reinvent education, reinvent careers, and a whole bunch of other things. But it's possible. It's at least possible. Okay, because previously you thought we're just locked in. Yeah. But I'd also say to policymakers or anyone influencing them and voters, the idea that magic policy is going to be pulled out of the hat to solve this, I would save your money.

2:46:51I would focus on the, unless it's focused on the young. Where should resources be focused mostly? Providing support for young parents in their 20s. What does that look like? If you're a young woman today, you have a vulnerability career-wise and you have a vulnerability, therefore, financially, but you've also a vulnerability in terms of divorce is still a common thing.

2:47:20And it's not an easy solution, but providing better assurance to young women that whatever happens... We've got you. We've got you. We've got you. Yeah, I mean, look, two things that we haven't spoken about much here. It's probably too culture-warsy. I'm actually... It obviously leads open to people saying, well, what about the pill? What about the sexual revolution? What about increasing divorce rates and the secular society and stuff like that? It's actually a bit culture. Maybe we can come back and do a group conversation with some of the other people I spoke about where it's their wheelhouse.

2:47:51But I will say this, so just the pill comes up a lot. The pill was legalized in Japan in 1990. Birth rates fell in the early 70s. The pill was legalized in the 70s or 60s, maybe elsewhere. So the idea it's all because of the pill. You just look at Japan and it's not as simple as that uh the point that i was about to make there you said sort of um women's level felt level of security it's a part of the the driver of this um it's really difficult to hear that and look at the um increased acceptance of divorce and not think about those two things being correlated because, and look, increased acceptance of divorce, does that mean that in the past, many women stayed in relationships with men that weren't right for them, weren't good for them because they were financial prisoners, because they were socially going to be ostracized.

2:48:52If they did do that, there was so much pain that was going to be associate. Yeah, I completely, I get that. But if we can't hold a couple of thoughts in our mind at one time, right? I'm not saying that that was good. I'm not saying that women should have stayed in relationships with men that weren't great fathers, that were abusive or uncaring or neglectful or whatever, right? Yes. But we can also see, okay, what can we take from that, that a pro-marriage culture, that one that encourages couples to not be confluent, that I'll stay with you for as long as you can provide something to me, but one that really genuinely commits, one that does look at a breakup not as a moral failing on either person's side, but as something that is to be avoided at all costs.

2:49:37Because the more of those that happen, the less confident young women are, and women in general, and men are, about committing to this thing. Sure. I think there's another dimension. Again, it's not easy to talk about, but it's there. I meet women who are divorced, older in life, who have no kids. I've also met women older in life who are divorced, who do have kids. What would you rather be? If the marriage doesn't work out, would you? And it's a personal choice again. But maybe in many cases, that risk of divorce should be weighed up against having a family in that context. And again, this is down to personal choices, but it is part of the equation.

2:50:31The calculus. Yeah. So it's not as simple. I mean, there are a lot of people who, you know, one of the things that I think I irritate some people, well, a lot of people. Me both, mate. people who promote marriage. But for me, it's the other side of the same coin. Simply saying, well, if people married more, they'd have kids more. I think often people are getting married simply because they want kids. You can't separate those, in my view. There's nothing wrong to promote marriage, of course. But I think focusing on that alone. Yeah, what is it in Western culture is only one third of babies are born outside of marriage?

2:51:10Yeah, well, I think it's a little bit more than that. I think in France it might be as low as that. But in Japan and South Korea, 95 % or more babies are born inside marriage. But what happens there is that in a relationship, if it's going well and maybe there's a pregnancy often planned, now it's time to get married because socially you've got to do that in Japan. There's a history and certain reasons for it. So, you know, there's a lot of complexities here. And, you know, for me, I sleep better because I, to me, now my second paper fatality curve is not yet peer reviewed. It's going to preprint very soon.

2:51:53It will be out there to be analyzed and it'll have to go through that scrutiny. But three years ago when I talked to you about unplanned childlessness, that wasn't peer reviewed. I put it out there because the data was clear. And now that has passed through peer review. So we'll see. At least for me, I am sleeping better at night that I know what the problem is. It's just the scale of the solutions, the reinventing of our 20s, basically, that friends me. Stephen Shaw, ladies and gentlemen. Stephen, you're great. I appreciate you, man. I commend the fact that you are continuing to be obsessive about this one problem.

2:52:27And yeah, people should just go and watch Birth Gap, search Birth Gap on YouTube. That's all you need to do. Birthgap.org to keep up to date with this stuff. I'm glad that I'm on this ride with you man I really am I think that we are talking about something that's really really important that's going to hopefully make people's lives and the future of the world a little bit better so well I appreciate your interest in this topic to be honest with you you've been a big factor in getting this story out there so thank you let's keep doing it